I finally finished reading "The First Tycoon:  The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt" by TJ Stiles.  It is a very interesting, but dense book (550 or so pages with 150 or so pages of notes, bibliography, index, etc.).  I have a lot of contradictory feelings about it.

The book is very well researched, tells an interesting story in an interesting manner, covers a time period I am not all that familiar with (Vanderbilt lived from the 1790s - 1870s) and has a lot to say about how the country was built and grew.  However, the amount of information in the book makes it a fairly slow read (it took me 3 weeks to finish, compared to maybe a week at most if it was fiction).  The number of different people who make up the story/history are hard to keep track of since they come in and out of the action over the years.  Since this also covers the creation of Wall Street and the stock market, a lot of economics is discussed/explained.  A lot of this goes in one ear and out the other (at least for me, which is why I disliked economics in college).  Also, since it took so long to read, I found I wasn't remembering what happened earlier in the book by the time I reached the end, especially (as I mentioned above) who did what when with which company (or which ship was which).

It did bring up an interesting question that I posed to a couple family members over Thanksgiving.  Whcih one do you find more impressive, a 500 page non-fiction book with 100 pages of footnotes or a novel of 1000 pages?  I asked my brother Ken and he thought the nonfiction was ore impressive because of the amount of research needed and the dificulty of finding a new way to present the information.  My father, though, thought the novel more impressive because anyone can do research and a lot has already been done for you if you check the bibliography of other books on the same topic.  I'm not sure where I fall exactly since I can see the merits of both arguments.  I know if it was me I would prefer to be able to write the novel, and would probably prefer reading it as well.

One final thought is how different things went in the book compared to how Vanderbilt was discussed in "The Men Who Built America" (see previous posts on that series).  The series spent a good amount of time talking about Vanderbilt working with Rockefeller to help corner the shipping of kerosene.  The book doesn't really discuss this and barely mentions Rockefeller at all.  He also shows up as more ruthless in the series than the book, where he is portrayed as tough, diplomatic and, if you broke a deal, fairly vindictive.  But by the time he was taking over and running railroads, the diplomacy was the first and second course of action before taking over or fighting other railroads.  Which is somewhat strange since the author (Stiles) appears in the series talking about Vanderbilt.

So, overall it is a very interesting book and worth reading if you have the time to sit down and do so, possibly more than once in order to make sure you keep everything and everyone straight.